» When night falls / She cloaks the world in impenetrable darkness / A chill rises from the soil and contaminates the air / Suddenly, life has new meaning. » Later Vikernes said this only refers ‘simply to darkness’, not “Satanism.”

Erikson I just ate some really spicy tacos and am feeling sick but when I read Stevens’ endorsement of evil I think of Lampert’s interpretation of Nietzsche. After the recent NCRP scandal one could almost substitute in Land’s name for N/Zarathustra:

“[Nietzsche] offers a saving knowledge of the world knowing that the gods who now rule require him to appear as the devil. Part of the esoteric task of Beyond Good and Evil is to make a new teaching on the divine capable of being heard or taken to heart
as one’s own.”

“Because of Nietzsche’s fame as the teacher of the death of God, it is easy to misread Zarathustra’s counsel of contempt as directed primarily against the religious tradition grounded in the Bible. But though such contempt is present, it is mostly presupposed. Zarathustra has returned to a world in which God is already dead, and although he loves to push over what is already toppling, his most vehement contempt is reserved for what still stands and what is coming to stand as a consequence of what is toppling, namely the modern teaching on progress, the modern form of pride that interprets the history of mankind edifyingly, in the form of self-congratulation, as the long struggle for democratic politics and universal enlightenment now reaching its culmination. It is the alleged freedom and the alleged enlightenment of progressive modern man that provokes Zarathustra into declaring war and calling on the best youths to share his revulsion for the things nearest them, the good as defined by democratic politics, the truth as defined and certified by democratic science. Zarathustra’s counsel of contempt for the things that modern man has been taught to honor most is counsel to disloyalty or treachery from the perspective of the watchful guardians of the modern herd, to whom Zarathustra is a wolf preying on their young, a teacher of evil, a nihilist opposed to civilization itself.”

This has to be more concrete, lest it be mostly lifestyle self-image grandstanding.

Speaking of images, what has died is the image of God in Westernoid general society, but certainly not everywhere.

God still is not dead, even in the atheistic. Only a type of image has died.

He lives on through different facets of bourgeois morality.

Which, no matter Commie or fascist criticism, is not something wholly rotten.

It is well enough to go for a phase in adolescence and early adulthood, of viewing it as a rotten, and almost conspiratorial phenomenon called “the System” as Stevens once described it (whatever that was).

We want to be able to run our own communities, not set a Cambodian Year Zero.

Blackrock today has laid off some masters of the universe while announcing their AI can out trade them cheaper.That they will eventually get rid of all their traders and are cutting their fees immediately.What flashed through my mind is who will know if the black boxes are colluding, Im guessing they could very subtly signal each other

Wall Street blows itself up about once a generation on models and algorithms. They will all collude involuntarily one day when reality breaks their assumptions and on that day, there will be two binary options: leave the AI on or unplug it.

Robert Burton—to affirm the Englishness of it all—provides a Latin tag for catabolic geopolitics, probably too bucolic for admin’s taste, & a litany of historic examples:

Many will not believe but that our island of Great Britain is now more populous than ever it was; yet let them read Bede, Leland, and others, they shall find it most flourished in the Saxon Heptarchy, and in the Conqueror’s time was far better inhabited than at this present. See that Domesday Book, and show me those thousands of parishes which are now decayed, cities ruined, villages depopulated, etc. The lesser the territory is, commonly the richer it is. Parvus sed bene cultus ager [a small farm, but well tilled]. As those Athenian, Lacedæmonian, Arcadian, Elean, Sicyonian, Messenian, etc., commonwealths of Greece make ample proof, as those imperial cities and free states of Germany may witness, those cantons of Switzers, Rheti, Grisons, Walloons, territories of Tuscany, Luke and Senes of old, Piedmont, Mantua, Venice in Italy, Ragusa, etc.
—Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621, 1651)

On a not entirely unrelated note, admin, what does the Alphanomics do with the ash ligature (æ)? I hope it’s go American and count it as just an e, e.g., mediæval = medieval.

what are the current fragmenting processes going on in Europe, besides Brexit (and now the related Scotish Independence)? I’ve heard something about France and the Netherlands, but nothing really substantial.